Zack Ward, who co-stars in Michael Bay's upcoming Transformers movie, told SCI FI Wire that he plays a character resembling Bill Paxton's cowardly soldier from Aliens in the film, an action epic based on the 1980s toy, TV and comics franchise. "It's a $200 million movie, man," Ward said in an interview. "It was insane."

Ward plays Donnelly, one of a group of special-forces rangers who encounter the title characters, alien machines who arrive on Earth to continue their galactic conflict.

"We're inside Iraq, coming back from a recon mission behind enemy lines, landing in the Blackhawk helicopter," Ward said. "I basically play the Bill Paxton character from [James Cameron's 1986 sequel] Aliens, but my character is a Boston smart-mouth, not a California surfer-dude smart-mouth."

Transformers will follow five separate storylines, which will all converge with a final battle between the Autobots and Decepticons, starting at Hoover Dam and ending in an American city that looks a lot like Los Angeles.

"It was an amazing film to work on," Ward said. "A lot of the robots and Transformers are actually half robot and half CGI, so there's a great integration between real and computer-generated things. It really creates a different platform for the audience." Transformers opens July 4. —Ian Spelling